You Are Late for My Wedding!
by emmylouuwho
Summary: 5.13 Amy remembers the Doctor.


Amy's mother leaned over Rory to say, "Your father, Amelia, will be the absolute death of me. Unless of course I strike preemptively." She straightened in her chair, as Amy laughed.

Out of the corner of her eye, Amy, still smiling broadly, noticed through the window a woman in black walking outside the reception hall, her curly hair blowing in the breeze as she made eye contact for a brief second. Amy's smile froze on her face, then faded, at the sight of the somehow familiar woman. _I know her, but I don't._

"Amy? You Ok?" Rory, still seated, looked up at her in concern.

"Yeah," she said, his words breaking into her thoughts. "I'm fine. I'm..." She sat back down. "Fine."

"Right," Rory replied. "Uh, you're crying."

Amy wiped a tear from her cheek. "So I am." She looked at her new husband in confusion. "Why am I doing that?"

"Because you're happy, probably," he said uncertainly. "Happy Mrs. Rory. Happy, happy, happy."

"No, I'm sad. I'm really, really sad."

"Great," he choked out.

"Why am I sad?" Amy noticed the blue book on the table in front of Rory. "What's that?"

"Oh, uh, someone left it for you. A woman." He handed the journal to Amy.

"But what is it?"

"It's a book."

Amy flipped through the book. Although the book looked old, every page was blank. "It's blank."_ It shouldn't be blank_, she thought. _But how do I know that?_

"It's a present."

Amy looked intently at Rory. "But _why_?"

"Well, you know the old saying. The old... wedding, thing."

Amy stared at the book. '_Brand new and ancient, and the bluest blue ever.' Who said that to me? When?_

"Amy?"

Her father stood at that moment, clearing his throat as he prepared to deliver his speech. "Ready now. Sorry about that. Last minute adjustments to certain aspects. Now then, it hardly seems a year..."

Amy stopped listening as more thoughts and images appeared in her mind. Where had they come from?

_Vincent van Gogh. A spaceship that was the UK. Reptiles that lived in the center of the earth. Venice. A box that was a prison._

She noticed a boy across the room wearing a blue bow tie, and an older man a few tables away wearing blue braces, and somehow these items meant something to her.

'_I'll be a story in your head. That's OK, we're all stories in the end... The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away.'_

"... at the age of six and announced that the new head teacher wasn't real because she looked like a cartoon."

"Shut up Dad!" Amy stood abruptly, and her father, along with everyone else in the room, looked at her in surprise.

"Amy?"

"Amelia?"

"Sorry but shut up, please! There's someone missing... someone important." She put her hand to her head, trying to sort out the jumbled thoughts. "Someone so, _so_ important."

"Amy, what's wrong?" Rory looked up anxiously.

"Sorry. Sorry everyone. But when I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend." Her parents, Aunt Sharon, and almost every other member of her family sighed. She could feel them all thinking, _Not this again._ And then her mother said it.

"Oh no, not this again."

"The raggedy Doctor. My raggedy Doctor. But he wasn't imaginary. He was real."

"The psychiatrists we sent her to," her mother said apologetically to the room at large, as though trying to explain away her daughter's erratic behavior.

'_The Doctor and Amy Pond, and the days that never came.'_

"I remember you," Amy said. Then she said louder, "I remember! I brought the others back, I can bring you home too. Raggedy Man, I remember you, and you are late for my wedding!" She pounded the table with her palm for emphasis.

The chandelier above them and the glasses on the tables began to shake slightly.

'_Oh, that box, Amy. You'll dream about that box. It'll never leave you.'_

"I found you," Amy said proudly, smiling. "I found you in words, like you knew I would. That's why you told me the story - the brand new, ancient, blue box. Oh clever, very clever."

The wind began to blow from somewhere. She heard the sound of the TARDIS landing. _The sound that happens when the Doctor leaves the brakes on,_ Amy thought with a smile. She remembered everything now.

"Amy, what is it?" Rory asked again.

"Something old. Something new. Something borrowed. Something blue."

"It's the Doctor," Rory said in an obvious voice.

The TARDIS solidified in the middle of the reception hall, and Amy immediately climbed over the table in front of her, hurrying over to the box.

"How did we forget the Doctor?" Rory asked the room, dumbfounded. "I was plastic..."

Amy knocked on the door of the TARDIS. "OK, Doctor. Did I surprise you this time?"

The door opened, revealing the Doctor in a top hat and tuxedo. "Yeah. Completely astonished. Never expected that."


End file.
